Author
DevOps and SRE Engineer/Instructor
David Essien writes practical, production-focused training and engineering guidance for DevOps Forge.
Master Dockerfiles from first principles with a Node.js + SQLite Recipe App. Learn each instruction, caching strategies, security best practices, and multi-stage builds for efficient, secure containers.
A deep technical exploration of how Kubernetes relies on core Linux primitives—namespaces, cgroups, virtual networking, and filesystem mounts—to orchestrate containers at scale. This article explains how Pods become Linux process groups, how kubelet and container runtimes build isolation boundaries, and how networking and storage map directly to kernel mechanisms.
This article explains why Elastic Network Interface (ENI) limits become a hidden bottleneck in ECS and EKS, how ENI trunking works under the hood, and why it enables higher workload density without changing fundamental performance limits.
This article explores the realities, trade-offs, and first principles of running highly available databases in Kubernetes. It explains why Kubernetes is optimized for stateless, ephemeral workloads, the challenges databases face under these assumptions, and what operational responsibilities teams inherit when they attempt to run production-critical stateful systems on Kubernetes.
This article continues the discussion on running highly available databases in Kubernetes, focusing on practical architecture patterns, operational realities, and responsible design. It covers consensus-based clusters, operator-managed databases, Kubernetes primitives that matter, backup and restore strategies, and how to make informed decisions about running databases in production.
This article presents a workload-first framework for choosing between AWS Lambda and Amazon ECS. It explains why both services can dramatically reduce costs in different scenarios, and shows how execution patterns, operational realities, and long-term economics—not service preference—should drive architectural decisions.
Learn how to build VPC endpoints in AWS using Terraform, enforce network-level security with endpoint policies, and ensure private, auditable traffic flows for your workloads.
Discover how AWS VPC endpoints keep your workloads private, reduce NAT costs, and enforce secure connectivity to AWS services. Learn the differences between Gateway and Interface endpoints, DNS implications, and layered security.
This article examines Kubernetes security from first principles. It explains how real-world failures occur across the container lifecycle, cluster control plane, networking, identity, and data layers—and what disciplined, layered practices can be applied to reduce blast radius, slow attackers, and recover safely when things go wrong.
This article dives into the internal architecture of Argo CD, explaining how its core components—Application Controller, Repository Server, API Server, and Kubernetes itself—work together to enforce GitOps discipline. It explores why Argo CD is built as a continuously reconciling, pull-based system and how that design enforces sustained correctness over time.
This article introduces Argo CD from first principles, explaining how it uses Git as the single source of truth to continuously align Kubernetes clusters with declared intent. It explores why pull-based GitOps isn’t just a deployment pattern—but a discipline that restores trust, reduces drift, and shifts team focus from “Did we deploy correctly?” to “Did we declare the right thing?”
This article explains Amazon EKS Capabilities from first principles. It explores why these capabilities exist, what it means for Kubernetes platform components to be AWS-managed, and how tools like Argo CD, AWS Controllers for Kubernetes, and Kube Resource Orchestrator fit together to reduce operational burden while preserving Kubernetes-native workflows.
This article explains how to build, tag, and push container images to Amazon ECR with production discipline. It focuses on reproducibility, security boundaries, traceability, and operational clarity—treating container images as part of the software supply chain, not just build artifacts.
This article breaks down how to secure CI/CD pipelines in practice. It walks through each pipeline stage, explains the security guarantees that matter, shows how to measure effectiveness, and explores the cultural and tooling decisions required to protect modern software delivery systems.
This guide explains why CI/CD pipelines have become prime attack targets, how real-world breaches happen inside delivery pipelines, and where the most common security weaknesses exist—from source control to deployment. It lays the foundation for building secure, resilient CI/CD systems.
This article introduces AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) from first principles. It explains why ECS exists, what it means for a service to be “managed,” and how core concepts like task definitions, tasks, services, clusters, and capacity fit together to run containers reliably in production.